As
2013 ends, once again we can’t thank you enough for your support.
The Winter Fund checks are arriving en
masse;
it is you, our members, who have kept this ship alive. Looking back
on our 2013 revenue, we received exactly $1,000 in government funding
from a City of Albany Arts Grant for public programming. Other
than that, every dime we’ve spent this year came from earned income
and contributions, plus all the donated services that keep us in the
black.
Additionally, the upcoming dry-docking is being funded totally by
your donations. SLATER exists because you want her to exist and we
can’t thank you enough for that.

We
are now dealing with two pressing issues: getting the permitting to
stay at the Albany berth year-round and preparing for the upcoming
dry-docking.
With regard to the permitting, you may be aware that the reason we
move every winter is that the seawall where we are tied off in Albany
isn’t designed to handle the lateral stress that a mooring wharf
can handle. The State’s primary concern is that ice working between
the ship and the seawall might damage the wall. Volunteer Charlie
Poltenson
obtained five years of ice data from the Coast Guard and Board
President Tony
Esposito
set up meetings with representatives of the NYS Department of
Transportation and prepared a report that covered all the
contingencies should we have to leave in an emergency. Based on the
Port of Albany being able to provide temporary berthing, the Coast
Guard being able to break us out, some rearrangement of the mooring
wires and the use of the Kasco circulators to keep ice from forming
around the ship, DOT is approving our request. This gives us a chance
to get some experience wintering on the Albany side. On a side note,
we rigged the twelve circulators around the ship to keep the area
between the ship and the seawall ice free. They worked perfectly
during the first hard freeze when the river froze over. We’re
grateful for all the help DOT has given us through this process.

Since
we made the decision to go into the shipyard, the focus of almost all
our energy has been to get ready for that event. Our target date is
still February 15th.
The
towing company has been contacted, as have the pilots. The proper
paperwork is being submitted to the Coast Guard.

All
of the lower magazines and lower storerooms have been cleared out by
the volunteers. To prepare for the hot work in the shipyard, the yard
workers need access to the hull from the inside for fire watch.
That’s a six and a half-foot band inside the ship, all the way
around for fire watch while the hot work is going on. There can’t
be any combustible material near the hull. Rosehn made arrangements
to have four portable storage units, PODs, put in the parking lot and
the volunteers have just about filled them with everything from
archived financial records to spare 12” signal lamps. Boxes of rate
badges, hundreds of uniforms, at least a thousand old signal flags,
dishes, searchlights, engine room tools and decking have all been
moved ashore. When filled, the plan is to move the PODs to their
secure storage area.

“Boats”
Haggart, Dick Walker, Gene Jackey, Larry Williams, Bob and Thomas
Scian, Bill Wetterau, Chris Fedden, Dave Mardon, Jim Gelston, Ron
Mazure, Walt Stuart, Chuck Teal, Barry Witte, Mike Marko, Gary
Sheedy, Ron Prest, Ken Kaskoun, Austin Tyron, Paul Guarnieri, Erik
Collin
and the guy I always forget have done an incredible job clearing out
those holds. We also had Sailors from Naval
Support Activity Saratoga Springs,
who were aboard two days this month, toting and hauling the heavy
stuff, thanks to the support of CWORick Croft.
The engineers, Ken Myrick, Karl Herchenroder, Gus Negus, Gary Lubrano and Mike Dingmon
have taken responsibility for the machinery spaces, clearing all
cabinets and material away from the shell plating. They also
unbolted all the manhole covers and left two nuts on each cover hand
tight. As we go through this process of “unbuttoning” the ship, I
can’t help but think how the battleship CALIFORNIA sank, partially
because she was unbuttoned for bilge inspections just like we are.

Gary
Sheedy deserves special mention for the difficulty he had clearing
the engineering storeroom and removing the sheathing and insulation
in the starboard reefer, after restoring it to pristine condition.
And, poor Bill Wetterau, Ron Mazure, Mike Marko and Mark Gardner
have been doing the lion’s share of the fiberglass insulation
removal, a miserable job under any circumstances. We’re taking
advantage of the mass movement of material to inventory what we have
and get our storerooms better organized. To that end, Bob Kibbey
is back building shelving against the inboard bulkheads in three of
the magazines. Tommy Moore
is doing the same thing in B-2. There will be a lot of consolidation
and reorganization of stuff when we put it all back together. It’s
also a chance to get all these spaces and bilges vacuumed out, and
touch up the rusted areas with Corroseal and paint.

In
an effort to save time and money we’ve hired our friends at West
Central Environmental to do bilge and tank cleaning here in Albany.
For 16 years,Dave
Cummings
and Bill
Goodine
have been handling our industrial waste disposal as a donation. Their
first project was the B -3 bilge; they filled two 55-gallon drums
with gunk and wiped the space down with cleaner. They will move into
B-1 shortly after the holidays. We’ve had our gang working from
the top down vacuuming and cleaning ahead of them so all the debris
on the upper levels won’t be falling into the clean bilges.

Two
marine surveyors, our insurance surveyor Claudio Crivici of
Castlerock Risk Management and Charlie Deroko, have volunteered
valuable advice. Also,
Ted Miles
of the San Francisco Maritime Museum sent us this encouraging email,
“Doubler
plates are a good thing! The Balclutha has been floating on a band of
doubler plate since the early 1960s. Also, our tug Hercules has a
waterline band around the hull, as well.” And, in a wonderful
case of inter-ship cooperation, Lisa
Simmons
and Dewayne
Davis
with the USS STEWART in Galveston sent us their whole blueprint
index. STEWART has the same hull as SLATER and was donated back in
the day when the donee got every scrap of paperwork on the ship. Ed
Zajkowski
went through the index and identified 16 critical drawings that we
may need for the dry-docking, such as details about the sonar dome,
hull frames and logitudinals. Lisa was kind enough to loan us those
16 blueprints which we had scanned by Hal
Hatfield’s son
Mike.

Right
now, based on Caddell's numbers for a 4' ice barrier and magnesium
anodes, the cost is estimated at $945,000.
Throw in 85K for towing and insurance and $17K for paint and
we're at $1,047,000. That doesn’t include any survey work, welding
inspections and contingencies. The concern is we will find something
we haven’t anticipated.

The
shipyard is planning on nine weeks to do the work.
I will be looking for groups of 4-6 volunteers to stay aboard the
ship in one-week shifts to help out with incidental work that needs
to be done and a couple guys to stay aboard for security on the
weekends. Tony has graciously volunteered to shuttle people back and
forth, so I expect to be aboard during the week and home on the
weekends. Ed Zajkowski and Gary Sheedy have volunteered to stay
aboard with me.

Meanwhile,
a couple other projects are continuing. Doug Tanner, Tim Benner
and SuperDave Mardon
finally got that annoying leak repaired in the overhead of the
Chief's Mess that was under the hedgehog projector. And, the radio
gang must have missed an action dispatch about the planned
dry-docking, because Joe
Breyer, Jerry Jones and Mike Wyles
are up in the shack like nothing unusual is happening aboard. But, there
is a reason for their focus.

During
the summer of 2012, we were approached by some ex-Navy hams who
wanted to participate in the prestigious Italian Naval Old Rhythmers
Club, an event that was a great success and generated a lot of
publicity for us, including a QST article.
One of the participants, Stan
Levandowski,
who served aboard
USS BOXER LPH4, got very involved with us, trained to be a tour
guide, and has been guiding tours every Thursday for the last season.
He drove over an hour each way to get here. While he's also a lover
of the old gear, Stan lamented that there was no fast and easy way
for him to get quickly on the air between tours and promote the
SLATER. So Stan and Jerry began working toward getting SLATER
equipped with a "Real American" ham station, something that
was state-of-the-art, powerful, and could operate both Morse CW and
Single-Sideband voice. They imagined the ideal situation where one
switch would be flipped to power up the station and then the
state-of-the-art transceiver would automatically tune the antenna in
milliseconds. One could be on the air within a minute or two. Stan
felt strongly that the mission of the radio gang isn't just
preservation; it's also promotion of the 'SLATER project'
on the air.

Stan
donated his Elecraft K2/10 low power QRP transceiver and, working
with
Dale
Putnam WC7S of Cheyenne, Wyoming, Tony Baleno N3ZN, and Ken Kaplan
WB2ART, a 100-watt linear amplifier was added.
All the equipment was
checked out and sent back to Stan's house.
The downside was that Stan had been diagnosed with non-fatal leukemia
late last summer, but was still giving tours even while undergoing
chemo treatments in the fall. All
was going well until he contracted pneumonia and things took a turn
for the worse. Jerry drove to Stan's house to pick up the equipment
and the crew has been working feverishly to get it online. They
reported to Stan, who was in the hospital, that they had made their
first contacts a couple of weeks ago using the ship’s original
antennas. They are now on the air most Saturdays and have
accomplished the first part of what
Stan set out to do, spreading the word about SLATER. They report that
the K2 transceiver is really an amazing piece of
equipment.

Of
course, a modern radio in a vintage shipboard radio room is most
certainly out of place.
We solved that problem by installing the entire station in a vintage
1945 locker cabinet. When those doors are closed, there is
absolutely no evidence that SLATER has anything but vintage equipment
in Radio Central. Now, some may argue that a historic ship should use
its vintage equipment if it wants to put its signal on the air. We
are striving to get SLATER's equipment up and running, but it's no
longer 1945. Today's amateur radio bands are crowded and frequency
agility is a must. With the old Navy radios, once set on frequency
with the old LM frequency
meter, you stay there.
In addition, single-sideband was not invented until more than a
decade later. On today's ham bands, there is little AM phone used.
So, while the SLATER'S vintage equipment is partly operational and
can be used for special occasions, if one of the functions of
the
radio shack is to promote the Museum and be a worldwide presence,
communicating with modern equipment is as essential as being able
to communicate with the original old gear. Look for SLATER's ham
station, call sign WW2DEM (WORLD WAR 2 DESTROYER ESCORT MUSEUM) on
7062 kcs CW, 7262 kcs SSB, 14.062 mcs CW, and 14.262 mcs SSB. We
have a nice QSL card which we send to all stations ‘worked' who
send us a
SASE. Check our QRZ page.

We’re
losing a couple of friends this month, but not really.
In addition to December 31 being Mayor
Jerry Jennings
last day in office, longtime friend, historian, author and Trustee
Robert
F. Cross
is leaving his position as Water Commissioner. Thank to Bob’s
support over the past 16 years, many tasks that would have been
almost impossible to accomplish were made easy thanks to the support
of the Albany Water Department, Bob,
John Kosa, Mike Ruede
and Butch.
But we’re not really losing Bob. He’s remaining on our Board and
is still the Chairman of the Albany Port District Commission, and
taking John Kosa with him to the Port.

We
also had a couple special events this month. On Saturday December 7th
we co-hosted the annual commemoration of the Pearl Harbor attack with
Albany County Veterans Service Bureau and the Zaloga
American Legion Post 1520.
Seventy-two years after 2,403 Americans were killed in a surprise
Japanese air attack on the Hawaiian naval base, only three veterans
who lived through it are known to survive in the Capital Region. Two,
Charles
Ebel,
93, who served aboard USS CURTISS and William
Langston,
92, who was a fireman aboard WEST VIRGINIA BB-48, attended the 8:30
a.m. Pearl Harbor Day Memorial Observance. The SLATER Color Guard was
out in force, joining with Sailors from our local Naval Reserve
center to form a color guard of the old and new Navies. Our Board
Chairman BJ Costello served as emcee for the event and did his usual
professional job at moving the program along. The Pearl
Harbor Survivors Association estimated last year that only 3,000
remain. The 53-year-old association disbanded in 2012 due to aging
membership. Locally, we lost three Pearl Harbor survivors since last
year. Our thanks to Charles
Burkes
and Harvey
Martel
who organized the event.

We
were also invited to a ceremony at Peebles Island, the headquarters
of the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic
Preservation.
We were among the six recipients of the 2013 New York State Historic
Preservation Awards. Established in 1980, the State Historic
Preservation Awards are given each year to honor excellence in the
protection and rejuvenation of New York's historic and cultural
resources. The citation for USS SLATER read in part, “Fortunately,
the Destroyer Escort Sailors Association, a nationwide organization
dedicated to recognizing the importance of destroyer escorts and
those who served on them, came to the ship's rescue. The Greek Navy
donated the ship to the association, which raised money to bring it
to New York and established the Destroyer Escort Historical Museum to
take charge of its restoration. The project's great success is a
testament to the effectiveness of the museum as well as the
commitment of its volunteers. In addition to being an educational
asset, the Slater has become an important patriotic symbol, honoring
all those who serve the country in the military, especially the
United States Navy.” Again, our thanks to longtime friend Mark
Peckham, who
shepherded us through the Landmark process and no doubt had a role in
this recognition.

In
better times the award, coupled with our National Landmark status,
would have certainly garnered us some governmental financial support,
but these aren’t better times.
So once again, I end with our thanks and the request that if you
haven’t sent that Winter Fund donation yet, please do so now, and
be as generous as you can. Go to the donate button on the homepage at
www.ussslater.org
or print out the donation form here:
http://www.ussslater.org/publications/signals/vol-14/winterfund.html